skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I fully agree Buffett is a one of a kind investor who's outperformed. I would love to have owned BRK shares, and still think you can't really go wrong owning them. That said, his performance v. S&P 500, a simple index, hasn't persisted. Basically, Buffett lost his advantages and even started making public bets that index funds would outperform actively managed funds.

> I did the math and starting from 1965 to 2002, a period of 38 years, the compounded annual return of the S&P 500 was 10.02% while that of Berkshire was 25.66%. But—and here's the kicker—from 2003 to 2022, a period of 20 years, the S&P 500 delivered a 9.80% compounded annual return while Berkshire came in lower at 9.75%. [0]

He's gotten fined for insider dealing by the SEC. And I figure that a lot of his "alpha" came in the earlier days of the markets when there was less regulation.

FWIW, here's an interesting article on Buffett's alpha. [1]

> Previous researchers analyzing Buffett’s returns using conventional size, value, and momentum factors haven’t been able to adequately explain his outperformance, the authors say, leaving admirers to conclude that Buffett’s magic is pure alpha. So they extend the analysis by testing Buffett’s impressive returns — as measured by Berkshire’s stock — against two factors that better reflect his folksy investing wisdom: One called “Betting Against Beta,” which represents safe, low-beta stocks, and another called “Quality Minus Junk,” which represents the stocks of high-quality companies that are profitable, growing, and paying dividends.

The results? “Controlling for these factors,” the authors write, “drives the alpha of Berkshire’s public stock portfolio down to a statistically insignificant annualized 0.1%, meaning that these factors almost completely explain the performance of Buffett’s public portfolio.” The factors also explain “a large part” of Berkshire’s overall stock return, the authors add, as well as Berkshire’s private portfolio, insofar as their alphas also become statistically insignificant.

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/warren-buffett-has-underperfo...

[1] https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2012/09/11/chasing-w...
So saddened by this news. I worked with Gordon. He had a wonderful sense of humor. Was a true believer, die hard technologist, uncompromising, witty and honest. Will be having a drink here in his honor shortly.
> If I see someone shoplifting from Walmart, no I didn't.

So to take a recent example from my city (one of those cities so full of rampant petty theft that stores now inconvenience everybody by locking up toiletries), you don’t have a problem with this rich asshole with a $150,000 salary and his two disrespectful, disruptive teenagers stealing steaks and Monsters from Walmart?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0DoAkzdQig
This is from the paper drawing era.
One reason that AutoCAD was such a success was that, at last, you could ship editable drawings to others. You could be sure the dimensions totaled properly, since dimensions were derived from coordinates. This project ran into both problems - a supplier had drawings which disagreed with the company doing the assembly, and changes made in one part of the operation didn't propagate back to the master copy.
Modern manufacturing uses configuration management systems on drawings and models, just as programmers do with code. Outsourcing remains a headache.

There was a philosophical difference in manufacturing between the US and UK through WWII. In the UK, it was considered normal to have workbenches with people using files to touch up parts that didn't fit. In Detroit, parts that didn't fit were rejects, and discarded. The classic Detroit tester is a go/no go gauge.[1] This allowed assembly by low-skill workers. In the transcript of the meeting, you can read the argument between people from those different mindsets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go/no-go_gauge
ClipboardManager for macOS which can clip images, text and can sync to your OBS
The error rate of human mathematical work is not zero, but it does go down exponentially with the amount of time that the mathematician spends carefully thinking about the problem. Mistakes tend to be the result of typos, time pressure, or laziness - showing your work to others and having them check it over does help (it's one of the reasons we have peer review!), but is absolutely not necessary.

If the error rate is low enough - and by simply spending a constant factor more time finding and correcting errors, you can get it below one in a million - then you do get a virtuous feedback loop even without tying in a proof-checker. That's how humans have progressed, after all. While you are right to say that the proof-checker approach certainly is not trivial, it is currently much easier than you would expect - modern LLMs are surprisingly good at converting math written in English directly to math formalized in Lean.

I do think that LLMs will struggle to learn to catch their mistakes for a while. This is mostly because the art of catching mistakes on your own is not taught well (often it is not taught at all), and the data sets that modern LLMs train on probably contain very, very few examples of people applying this art.

A tangent: how do human mathematicians reliably manage to catch mistakes in proofs? Going line-by-line through a proof and checking that each line logically follows from the previous lines is what many people believe we do, but it is actually a method of last resort - something we only do if we are completely lost and have given up on concretely understanding what is going on. What we really do is build up a collection of concrete examples and counterexamples within a given subject, and watch how the steps of the proof play out in each of these test cases. This is why humans tend to become much less reliable at catching mistakes when they leave their field of expertise - they haven't yet built up the necessary library of examples to allow them to properly interact with the proofs, and must resort to reading line by line.
Creator of apolloinrealtime.org here. I work on the ISS program now. Hat’s off, sir.
Ah, yes, AI jam tomorrow.

(Though, perhaps an unusually pessimistic example of the “real soon now, it’ll be usable, we promise” phenomenon; rifles took about 250 years to go from ‘curiosity’ to ‘somewhat useful’).
I think it would be much better if the comments here focused on the benefits of passive, long term investments in index funds. As it is, I worry people will “correct” by leaving money in a savings account instead.
After my WRX, which was garaged six years ago, all our current cars are boring. I actually find the Leaf a bit more interesting in that it has pretty good pickup when you turn off Eco mode; very nice off the line for what looks like a granny car. The last X years, I've only ever driven with the purpose of getting from A to B, not "for the sake of the drive", so that adds some context to where my opinion comes from.

The place I bought the Leaf from imports them from a Japan, so I assume he's fairly selective in choosing which ones to bring across.

He also said that the Nissan themselves were expecting shorter life from the batteries than what ended up occurring - along the lines of setting up battery recycling / refurbishment / repurposing facilities.

I'm actually considering getting a newer model (ZE1, 2018+) to replace one of the other ICE cars, but two months isn't enough time to form a definitive opinion. I think the newer model has options for Vehicle-to-X charging, which makes things interesting. But I'm probably getting way ahead of myself.
Turns out those devs were indeed hardcore, just not in a great sense.
I agree - I had a traveling consulting/repair job before digital maps were a thing. Every year a 50 page city-wide street map book would come out, and you'd buy one every few years from Costco, as needed.

North was always up. I learned to navigate in that mindset and to this day maps that rotate based on direction facing (even in video games!) just don't match the mental model I have of driving.

GPS's gives you a single track view of how to solve a problem, when it's either advantageous or required to react differently (ex: road hazards, opportunistic turns if driving diagonally across a grid), and when you deviate from the single track it creates annoying noise, especially if the road names are not phonetic or in other languages.
Things I've been working on and thinking about following my startup journey
i’m looking at the entire life of these pieces.

the intention of the artists was for these to be enjoyed, my “season” reference is the one extended run these had in their original form before being relegated to boxes for decades.

fun was only permitted on these for a season, literally. i’m a fan of art and art museums, but i’m also a clown and an entertainer and there’s a sadness to this that i’m articulating— in san francisco specifically, busking is also a casualty of the bygone era of fun.

the data point i’ll use for that is when i tell people i “busk”, i need to define it. i don’t even put out a hat to avoid being a “pan handler”, but the game has become “where do the police not want independent artists”, which is a sad state of play, that’s not my choosing.

if the carnival won’t let kids play, at least hire some clowns to be props instead of running empty carousels like a more dystopian sequel to Children of Men.
There's not much there to disagree with. It's pretty clear that Apple thinks they'd lose more than they'd gain by having their own search service. As it is, they don't have to do anything except sign some documents and set a default URL and they make $20 Billion.

I wish my life was that uncomplicated.
The former are interesting topics to be sure, but have very little to do with with active engagement in modern society.
It would be a lot simpler if you could just install NVMe drives internally, wired directly to the CPUs PCIe bus with nothing inbetween to slow it down, but alas if Apple let you do that it would cut into their business of selling internal SSD upgrades at a 500% markup.
You can even undo operations that aren't the most recent one.
This story is a good example of one major reason: trains are way more robust. Imagine a similar catastrophic fire in the cockpit of a high speed train. Worst case, you hit the emergency stop and then evacuate the train. The only person who would be at risk would be the train driver. Have that fire in an airplane and everyone on board dies.

This incident wasn't a terrorist attack, but the same idea applies there. The Lockerbie bomb, for example, was pretty small. Setting it off in a train might have killed some nearby people, but that’s all. But set it off in an airplane and you can kill hundreds.
Tell me you weren't raised poor without telling me you weren't raised poor?
You are correct. I used the wrong unit:

https://jsmemtest.chipsandcheese.com/latencydata

We can say around 100ns, although likely somewhat more.
It’s a cheap way to purchase a diverse subset of the global economy. That’s as timeless as it gets.
PixLens: A lens that turns the scenery you see into pixel art
No, the point is that if you object to professional sports on the basis that it's "watching millionaires play for billionaires", then to be consistent you should also object to scripted television/movies, which can have the same objection levied against it. That's not to say you can't prefer sports over scripted television/movies, just that you can't use that excuse to hate on former and but still claim to enjoy the latter.
Nim has Natural and Positive (signed int) types that checked at compile and runtime. You can also define arbitrary range types for any ordinal type, for example enums:

type
Month = enum Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, ...
SpringMonth = range[Mar..May]

var m: SpringMonth = Mar

It will raise under/overflow exception if value falls out of range.
You mean fire the government trying to destroy a free and open internet, while they still have the choice to do it. I really wish there was more of this whole sale firing of representatives that betray the interests of their country to support the megacorps
> Kids need love and compassion. They don’t need perfect parents.

Now you are just making him feel worse, since his problem is that he can't give his kids love and compassion.
Everyone Happy！
Yea, but that's my argument - that they're being dense (i imagine on purpose?). The phrase doesn't mean that nothing can fail at runtime. Of course it doesn't.

Rather that we have many tools to write a program that can be written with many compile time checks. For example many representations of state can be describe in compile time checks via enums, type transitions, etc.
This is why I think cross-training is so important and I should do more of it. Even something relatively minor, like doing the Advent of Code in elixir (nim last year) has made my python significantly easier to reason about. If you quit mutating state so much, you eliminate whole classes of bugs.
rare (in the) earth, i.e. well distributed, not lacking in quantity.
Answering that on HN is the final operational security failure listed in the article.
My biggest takeaway from this was finding out they have USB4 2.0. Come ooooonnnnnnnnn. Wikipedia starts by saying USB4 isn't 4.0 (that'd make too much sense I guess). So disappointing.
They are real human beings, they aren't props.
Even if we grant everything you said, if you adopt that as your moral/legal system, the "extra dollar" will quickly snowball into hundreds to thousands of dollars as everyone realizes that they can steal with impunity.
AI generated tools can make programming more fun
context is audience dependent.
Are you a parent?

I ask because your friend group will radically be shaped by who you’d kids friends are.
Ask it which Beatle’s album it likes the best.
Are you really saying there are no situations where men are not treated as second class citizen? Especially around child rearing activities?

When the women around you treat you as a potential child molester and are vary about your every move simply because of your gender, you don't think that counts as being a second class citizen in those environments? Of course it does! In child care men are absolutely discriminated against and treated as lesser or evil, as just the stand in for the real parent: the mother.
Yeah, as you guessed, I am indeed not a physicalist :-)

I’m a Christian, so I believe in non-material existence a priori. Although, I don’t think that’s a particularly strong assumption on my part—frankly, I think it’s weaker than physicalism, which itself is often taken as a matter of faith.
You recently did a Show HN with this (47 points, 4 months ago, 50 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41221242
Ha, I used duckdb once and ran into a memory corruption issue through normal usage. It was a known issue also surfaced by a fuzzer. One of the devs referred to the fuzzer as the fusser in the issue about it and I stopped using the project immediately. Best of luck with that one!
I had gotten a contract with an unspecified California energy lab because they wanted to continue my summer internship research and it after 2 terms it still wasn’t solidified… so we moved on. People say government is slow but it wasn’t the government in my case… All these administrators drive up the cost but I’ve failed to see the value add
Agreed. I'm in the market for an imu and thought "ah the MPU 6050, I've heard of this one a lot even recently" and it's obsolete. This is typical of consumer to adafruit/sparkfun/aliexpress levels where they have countless old stock of cheapy proto boards to buy from, but if you're designing a whole new thing from scratch, that's inexcusable.
Yes, that is the point being made.
I have had the same thought but I'm a networking guy who occasionally plays a software guy so I am even further out of my depth. Also I hadn't been able to find any FPGAs that had PCIe and weren't absurdly expensive with a half dozen other high speed I/O ports this wouldn't need. The Tang Mega series does look interesting though.
Determine if it is a person that needs legal rights and independence.
When clicking or using "open in new tab" from the long press menu (not "open in new tab in group")?
Now I'm genuinely curious — what _does_ it reflect then?
> SSD upgrades at a 500% markup.

Is the price difference really that high or are you comparing them to cheaper SSDs?
Oh believe me I would have used that metric if there was one, but apparently there is no fecal storage tank as such; your poop is collected in a bag by the Universal Waste Management System or UWMS (which is what you call a space toilet when you're NASA and don't want to say "space toilet"), and those bags are stashed in a "removable fecal storage canister". Some of those canisters are returned to Earth "for evaluation" ("yup, it's poop"), but most are loaded onto a cargo ship that is then burned up on re-entry. Couldn't see any obvious telemetry for the UWMS' urine / feces separatator fan system kajigger either (the "Dual Fan Separator" + sort of gearbox, because apparently a space toilet needs a gearbox.)

This is not knowledge I ever expected to have.

https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/boldly-go-nasas-new-spa...
Or maybe they have thought things through and they just don’t agree with your conclusion.

For people who choose a non-viral license, why not go straight to public domain? I see three reasons: 1. it avoids confusion and difficulty with countries that don’t recognize public domain. 2. it provides an explicit disclaimer of liability. 3. people like the requirement to credit the author or distributing organization.

1 wouldn’t be a problem with short copyright terms. 2 shouldn’t be either. I doubt someone would get anywhere trying to sue for damages caused by a defect in copyright-expired code. You’d lose 3 after 10 years but I’d guess open source authors see that as a nice-to-have rather than a hard requirement. The credit in proprietary software using non-viral open source is almost always buried in some “licenses” file nobody ever looks at anyway.
Katrina Miller, New York Times reporter who wrote the cited article:

My Background

I joined The Times as part of the 2023-24 Newsroom Fellowship, a program for early career journalists, after earning a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago. In school, I studied how subatomic particles called neutrinos interact with matter, knowledge that may some day reveal why we have a universe. I graduated with a B.S. in physics from Duke University in 2016.
Why are so many people dying of pancreatic cancer? What is going on with this, it’s terrifying that this disease is on the rise but it can’t be detected before it’s too late
Yeah HN has been giving this advice since BTC was at 60k.

And 30k.

And 10k.
This HN thread was posted on Reddit and that programmer commented [0].

The full comment -

> Oh hey this is me. My typical setup is two terminals: one for vim, one running the compiler and other tools. I just make edits, then invoke the compiler, in a loop. As for finding a definition, most of the time I'm just familiar enough with the code that I know where it is. But when I don't, usually a well designed grep command will do the trick.

> The why: my job involves frequently doing development in environments I don't have much or any control over, and often don't even have Internet access. Over the years, I just learned to work with the basics (vim and a shell) since I can't take my favorite IDE with me to these different environments.

> Additionally, my vim configuration just involves setting up tabs to be 4 spaces and turning on line numbers. Having a complex config just became too much to try to keep in sync across environments.

[0]: https://reddit.com/comments/1hld3s4/comment/m3ladrs
When I was six my parents got me a 26" Schwinn single-speed bike. It was as tall as I was. I rode it until college, doing things that were heretofore unknown to science. IT WAS GREAT.
May as well ask them if they're still beating their wife.
Sorry to hear this

A lot of my teenage years were spent building and playing with PCs and a lot of the knowledge and interest came from reading each and every issue of boot and maximum pc
> Classic HN would be more like:

> "Actually, the reflectance properties of biological ultrablack materials have been well-studied. Here's a 2019 paper in Nature showing that certain deep-sea fish achieve 0.05% reflectance through specialized melanosomes. The ant's 1% is remarkable for a terrestrial organism due to [technical explanation]. Here's some interesting papers on biomimetic applications..."

> Instead we get: "Wikipedia says..."

> The contrast is stark:

> Old HN: Deep technical discussions, sources, papers

> New: "I checked Wikipedia and counted words"

> It's like watching someone try to critique a research paper by counting how many times they used the word "quantum" rather than engaging with the actual quantum mechanics.

> The "Wikipedia says..." on HN feels as out of place as someone posting "FIRST!!!" would have been in the old days. It's such a perfect example of discussion culture decay.
It's absolutely that high. Upgrading a Mac Mini from 256GB to 2TB is an extra $800, and a high-end 2TB NVMe drive like the WD SN850x is around $150 at retail. Even the 8TB version of that drive is only $650.

That's why external SSDs are so common in Mac setups, even accounting for the additional cost of a Thunderbolt enclosure it's usually still significantly cheaper than getting a bigger internal SSD from Apple.
The hardest thing for me to believe in The Martian was that one of the astronauts would have brought a book with a printed ASCII table in it.
Obligatory "uploading private health data to a random website is a bad idea" comment
Huh this comment thread may have convinced me to finally try it. I’m comfortable with git, and fixing mistakes in git, but not being able to trivially reverse any and every transaction is annoying.
ViXion01S: Automatic focus adjustment, the standard model of autofocus eyewear
Embrace the diversity. Some people use these tools, some don't. What matters is that you build something great at the end. The only people that are 'wrong' are the ones that mock those that use the features and the ones that mock those for not using them. Probably the best programmers are the ones that can adapt continuously to the new tools out there and find, and use, their strengths.
https://purelymail.com/pricing

https://purelymail.com/docs/features
IDEs are neither new nor fancy. I find it really amusing how many programmers spurn IDEs. It makes me think of a engineer refusing to use CAD.
Rust Evangelion Strike Force
Ah thunderbolt, yet another standard that started with a promise of simplicity but requires a lot of digging to understand what actually works.

For me some things worked better than expected (5K + 4K monitor at 60Hz, even though it states only one 5K or two 4K monitors), some things don't (work laptop detects the hub, but the displays stay blank.
If the metal is reduced, then it should not be reactive. How does this become relevant to all of the oxygen in the atmosphere?
Looks amazing -- hopefully some day they'll add git-lfs support and I'll finally be able to try it. :-)
I would like to remind everyone that the "New pull request" button is like right there on https://github.com/jaennaet/piSSStream/pulls

It'd be fantastic to have the flag of the country last pissed on in the menu bar item.

Ie. when the tank level increased last I guess? The value doesn't always seem to just monotonically increase though, but I could be wrong – frankly I haven't paid that close attention to the value. Could also be something like microgravity causing a bit of… uh… slosh making the sensor reading slightly inaccurate, or something along those lines?